Image, Music, Power: Julian Henriques and Parminder Vir's Work in Film and Television Event 1
When:
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Venue:
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
Event 1
Title: We the Ragamuffin and Babymother
Date: Friday 11th October, 18:30
Venue: Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PY
Screening of We the Ragamuffin (1992), Babymother (1998) and Word, Sound, Power (2020). Introduced by director Julian Henriques and producer Parminder Vir OBE.
Babymother tells the story of Anita (Anjela Lauren Smith), a young Black woman and mother of two, who, together with her two friends (Caroline Chikezie and Jocelyn Jee Esien), is determined to become a successful dancehall dee-jay, make a professional recording of her music, and transgress the role assigned to her by British society at large and, more locally, the music scene in which she is a participant. However, Anita’s ambitions are met with various challenges along the way, not least the lived and financial realities of parenting, her babyfather Byron’s (Wil Johnson) careerist ambitions, and the disapproval of her family.
Written and directed by Julian Henriques and produced by Parminder Vir, this film is often identified as the first Black British musical, and it is focussed on the dancehall scene in Harlesden, northwest London. In his review of the film, Professor Stuart Hall described the film’s treatment of dancehall as ‘first rate’, praising the recording and performance scenes, Carroll Thompson and Cinderella’s musical contributions, and Peter Middleton’s cinematography. To this list, the late Annie Curtis Jones’ extraordinary costume design must be added. Her decision to incorporate fabrics and jewellery purchased from Punjabi-owned shops in Southall reflects the heterogenous cultural influences on the emerging dancehall fashion. Just as the music combines different influences, so too the clothing. In his review, Hall also pinpointed the central issue raised by the film: ‘Babymother marks another episode in second-wave feminism's long, incomplete march. It reminds us that popular culture, despite its elements of celebration and resistance, is also and always an ambiguous and contradictory space. Among other issues, Babymother poses the question of just how, and by what complicated shifts, the liberation of women is connected to girl power.’
We the Ragamuffin (1992), Henriques’ musical short film for Channel 4, can be considered the ‘stepping stone’ to the feature-length Babymother. Shot on the North Peckham Estate, We the Ragamuffin features a cast of local musicians, including Buckey Ranks, Jerry Lionz, and the late Militant Dee. The film moves between musical performance and improvised drama, outdoor sound systems (Lewisham’s legendary Saxon Studio International) and interior spaces, including recording studios, club and domestic spaces. As with Babymother, this work is a fictional film that has a documentary quality, a time-capsule that indexes a local music scene and social housing that has since been demolished. Both works also feature women stepping into roles that were previously preserved for men. In the case of We the Ragamuffin, this includes a female dee-jay (Militant Dee) and promoter (Annette Toyloy). This event finishes with one of Henriques’ short documentaries, part of his ongoing research project, investigating sound systems and other street technologies around the world.
Word, Sound, Power (2020, 10 min.) is documentary produced and directed by Daniel Acevedo and Recardo Vega about the Columbian sound system El Gran Latido. Henriques commissioned it as part of his ERC research project, Sonic Street Technologies.
Notes
Spanning musical, documentary, agit-prop and essay film, this retrospective looks at some of Professor Julian Henriques and Parminder Vir OBE’s work as directors and producers in film and television over several decades. The programme has been developed with the intention not only of screening a series of important works but also of considering the conditions of possibility, the political, social and aesthetic connections, that make movements and moments possible. The screenings and discussions should appeal to the younger generation looking for inspiration from the film history they’ve inherited as well as those who were there at the time.
The 1980s fundamentally transformed British film and television, witnessing the launch of Channel 4 (1982) and the emergence of an independent Black British cinema. As this series attests, Henriques and Vir were active in both. In 1987, they established the production company Formation Films and made Exit No Exit, a thirty-minute Orpheus-inspired dance drama set in the London Underground, directed by Henriques for Dance on Four. Previously, Henriques produced another work for Channel 4 which is included in this retrospective and celebrates its 40th anniversary this year: On Duty (1984). Directed by Cassie McFarlane and adapted from the play by Michael McMillan, this drama-documentary about the true story of Rita Maxim, a Caribbean NHS worker, who fought the management of St Mary’s Hospital and refused to sign the new privatisation contract they attempted to impose.
In the early 1980s, Vir worked at the Commonwealth Institute and, together with Jim Pines, co-organised the Black Film Festival at the Commonwealth Institute in London in 1982. She then began working at Greater London Council (GLC) and, as Imruh Bakari has recently noted, convened the Third Eye: London’s Festival of Third World Cinema (1983) collaborating with others including June Givanni and Lionel Ngakane. As the GLC Ethnic Arts Officer (1982-1986), Vir developed the policy for funding the Black film and video sector, an initiative that paved the way for funding important workshops in London, including Black Audio Film Collective, Sankofa Film and Video, Ceddo Film and Video Workshop, and Retake Film and Video Collective, as well as independent production companies like Kuumba Productions and Penumbra Productions. These crucial events and initiatives have led to a revolutionary body of work and discourse that artists, curators and scholars continue to grapple with today. In 1986, Vir presented a showreel of Black and Asian filmmakers to the editorial staff in the BBC, where she would be employed, eventually as series producer, until 1994, working with many important filmmakers from across the globe, including Deepa Dhanraj, Gaston Kaboré, Michel Khleifi and Raoul Peck.
During the 1990s, Vir also produced numerous documentaries, including Algeria: Woman at War (1992), a work that combines archival footage and interviews to address the crucial role Algerian women played in their country’s liberation struggle from the French and their equally important place in political life at the time of the work’s making. In this retrospective, the film will be screened alongside Professor Manthia Diawara’s reflexive essay film Rouch in Reverse (1995). In this latter work, for which Henriques and Vir were executive producer and producer respectively, Diawara offers a nuanced and critical account of Jean Rouch, often described as the ‘father of ethnographic cinema’ and precursor to the French New Wave.
Henriques two most widely seen films, We the Ragamuffin (1992) and Babymother (1998), focus on the dancehall scenes in Peckham and Harlesden respectively. During this time, Henriques also made Derek Walcott: Poet of the Island (1993) for BBC Arena, a documentary presented by Hall and featuring a wide-ranging and probing interview with the Saint Lucian poet, playwright and Nobel Laureate. The retrospective also features two recent works by Henriques, a documentary about the artist Denzil Forrester titled Denzil’s Dance (2019), and a short documentary from a much larger series that is part of Henriques’ ongoing research project, funded by the European Research Council, investigating sound systems and other street technologies around the globe. While the music scenes documented in We the Ragamuffin and Babymother seem at a historical distance in 2024, it is clear that the deep engagement with sound systems, whose influence continues to reverberate around the world, is being continued by Henriques today as professor in the Media, Communications and Cultural Studies Department at Goldsmiths, University of London. No event could testify to that more than Jah Shaka’s Nine Night, convened by Henriques at the Great Hall of Goldsmiths, on 21st April 2023.
Curated by Oliver Fuke.
Contact name:
Matthew Barrington